Stories of
American Heroes -
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Technical
SergeantForrest LeeWoodyVosler

Deadly Danger....

....Blind
Determination!

In July
1941, six months before Pearl Harbor but with war seemingly
imminent, President Roosevelt proactively requested a War
Plan from the Departments of both the Army and the
Navy. Lieutenant Colonel Clayton Bissell, a World War
I ace and member of the Army's WPD (War Plans Division)
suggested that the newly reorganized AWPD (Air War Plans
Division) be tasked with writing the plan for the
implementation of the air assets as an addendum to the
Army's report. The resulting report, hammered out in
nine days by three of AWPD's planning officers, reflected
the Army Air Force's prevailing doctrine of precision,
daylight, strategic bombardment as the primary role of
Army Air Force assets.

This
concept, initially postulated by World War I aviation
visionary Guilio Douhet of Italy, envisioned air assets as
the primary national defense when employed offensively--The
best defense is a strong offense. The primary role
of these air assets was, in the opinion of Douhet,
bombardment of the enemy:

Bomb
and destroy the enemy's own air assets on the ground so
that they could not be employed against YOU, and

Destroy
the enemy's capability to make war by bombing factories,
industrial plants, and economic centers.

Ancillary
to this practical advantage to strategic bombardment was the
negative psychological impact on the enemy populace when
they were subjected to regular bombardment.
Ultimately, Douhet believed aerial attacks on the enemy's
cities would quickly rob that enemy of the will to fight.

While
military leaders in Douhet's native Italy, as well as in
England and the United States, were slow to acknowledge
military aviation as anything more than ancillary to
traditional manners of waging war, Germany was quick to
build a powerful air arm. It was the might of the
Luftwaffe, built up during the 1930s, that concerned men
like Charles Lindbergh and Eddie Rickenbacker into
cautioning the United States from entering Europe's War
in the years preceding Pearl Harbor. Quite frankly,
neither Britain or the U.S. was a match for the Luftwaffe in
1941, and it was only a result of sheer guts and
determination that enabled the R.A.F. to turn back Germany's
aerial blitz during the Battle of Britain. Winston
Churchill aptly summarized the nature of that David and
Goliath battle when he noted: "Never have so
many, owed so much, to so few."

Following
the attack at Pearl Harbor that shattered any American hopes
for neutrality in the brewing war, and with subsequent
declarations of war on Japan, Germany and Italy, the defeat
of Hitler's Third Reich became the primary focus of the
Allied effort. In the Pacific, General Douglas
MacArthur's forces were relegated to what was supposed to be
a strictly defensive war of containment of the Japanese,
while the Allies went on the offensive in Europe.

Even
before the United States entered the war, Germany occupied
virtually all of Europe save for neutral Switzerland, and
pro-Axis but technically neutral Spain and Portugal.
The entirety of the north shore of the European continent
from France to Holland was occupied by Nazi forces,
establishing a well-fortified wall between London and
Berlin. Top military planners in the Allied Forces
therefore, were nearly single-minded in their strategy to
defeat Hitler. The fall of the Reich was contingent
upon a cross-channel invasion. It was not a novel concept.

Operation
Sea Lion

The
English Channel is a narrow strip of the Atlantic Ocean that
separates England from the European Continent.
Stretching across the northern coast of France for 350
miles, at its widest point it is 150 miles across; only 21
miles at its narrowest point between Dover in England and
Cape Gris-Nez in France. William Shakespeare saw the English
Channel as a wall that protected his nation, writing in his
play Richard II, that it existed "As a moat
defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier
lands."

Following
his conquest of France and the occupation of that nation by
Nazi forces, Adolph Hitler turned his war machine loose upon
his only remaining enemy at that time, the island nation of
Great Britain. He dubbed his campaign Unternehmen
Seelöwe, or Operation Sea Lion, ultimately
destined to become a cross-channel invasion of
England. To insure success of that invasion Hitler
believed it first necessary to destroy the Royal Air Force's
capabilities to turn back an amphibious assault, and
unleashed the Luftwaffe in the historic Battle of Britain
which began on July 10, 1941. It became the largest
and most sustained bombing campaign ever mounted, and the
first true test of emerging doctrines of strategic
bombardment. Operation Sea Lion was abandoned at the
end of October, not because Hitler's strategy of strategic
bombardment had been unsuccessful, but probably because
Hitler did not realize how successful it HAD been.
Most historians believe that had the Reich mounted a
cross-channel invasion late in 1941, England would have
succumbed to Hitler's powerful forces. But the valiant
resistance of the RAF, and the indomitable spirit of the
British people under the leadership of an unshakable Winston
Churchill, belied the devastating toll the Battle of
Britain had taken on their country. In 1941 it was
not the English Channel that served as Britain's protective moat,
but the will and determination of the British people that
caused Hitler to re-think his planned invasion.

Operation
Overlord

The tables
turned on Hitler when the United States entered the
war. Just as Hitler's strategy after the fall of Paris
had been a cross-channel invasion of England, now the Allied
strategy turned towards a cross-channel invasion of occupied
France, followed by a drive into the heart of Germany.
The problem was that the same moat that had protected castle
England for centuries, also protected the shores of
Nazi-occupied France.

At the
first Allied council of war, the ARCADIA CONFERENCE
which was held in Washington, D.C., during the last week of
1941 and into the first two weeks of 1942, the primary topic
of discussion was such an invasion. For Allied war
planners from both Britain and the United States, there was
a sense of urgency to mount this invasion. Both
Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt, who met
face-to-face during the conference, while supporting in
principle the need for a cross-channel invasion, tempered
the enthusiasm of their top military leaders with the need
to properly prepare for that channel crossing. Ultimately
it would become known as Operation Overlord, but not
for more than two years. Much as Hitler used the
Luftwaffe to soften England for his own planned invasion of
that country, the D-Day invasion of France had to be first
prefaced by aerial warfare to neutralize the impact of
Germany's air force on any Allied invasion of the European
continent.

To the
military planners meeting at the Arcadia Conference, victory
in Europe was still seen as coming only as a result of
traditional warfare by ground units. Aircraft, still
viewed as auxiliary to these forces, became the means to
that end. The mission of the R.A.F. and the U.S. Army
Air Force was two-fold and classic Douhet:

Bombing Fortress Europe into
submission was no simple assignment. Bombers based in England
had to deal first with weather, then traverse the waters of the
Atlantic or the North Sea where they were met by the combat-seasoned
pilots of the Luftwaffe, determined to shoot them down before they
could arrive over deadly, flak filled skies above the
continent. Those bombers fortunate enough to reach their
target and drop their payload then had to fight their way clear of
the continuing flak, penetrate the screen of enemy fighters, and
again traverse the lonely expanse of often heavy seas to return to
the fog-shrouded air fields back home. It is little wonder
that so few airmen survived long enough in the early days of the war
to complete the 25 missions that would earn them a trip home.

Such
daring dedication called for a special breed of fighting men, men
undeterred by the odds stacked heavily against them. One
airman, when asked why he chose to fight in the air, glibly quipped:
"It's the only place in the military where you can retreat
at 300 miles per hour."

The
Royal Air Force had conducted night bombing raids against targets
inside occupied Europe long before the United States entered the
war. When General Ira Eaker arrived in England a few weeks
after the Arcadia Conference to build the Eighth Air Force, he came
with the American strategy for strategic bombing raids employing
massive, HIGH-ALTITUDE, DAYLIGHT attacks. Veteran British
pilots were certain the concept was doomed to failure. At
least at night, bomber formations were shielded by darkness from
enemy fighter attack.

General
Eaker's strategy, rooted in the theories of air power espoused by
visionaries like Douhet and General William Billy Mitchell,
was as yet untested in combat action. It was predicted upon
the debates at the Air Corps Tactical School in the late 1920s and
early 1930s when Kenneth Walker, one of the architects of the Air
War Plan delivered to President Roosevelt in 1941, put forth what
would become his mantra:

"The
well-organized, well-planned, and well-flown
air force (bombing) attack
will constitute an offensive that cannot be
stopped."

Every Man a Gunner

Key to that philosophy was the
impressive American B-17 bomber. The 70-foot, four engine
heavy bomber was not only built to fly long distances at high
altitude (by 1941 developments gave it an 1,800-mile range with a
ceiling of 35,000 feet) to drop a three-ton load of bombs, it was
well armed. When Boeing introduced the test model in 1935 the
impressive battleship of the sky carried five 30-caliber and
50-caliber machineguns with which to defend itself against enemy
fighters. That staunch array of firepower prompted early newspaper
reporters to dub it a "Flying Fort." By the time the
first Flying Fortresses began arriving in England in the
summer of 1942 to begin their bombing campaign against Europe, they
were sporting as many as a dozen or more 50-caliber machineguns. Each
B-17 was crewed by a team--ten men--and each of them was a gunner.

On the ceiling of the Flying
Fortress and directly behind the pilot in a rotating Plexiglas bubble were mounted the twin fifties of the Top
Turret, usually manned by the senior enlisted crewman and aircraft
ENGINEER. Further back in the fuselage the radio man's
training equipped him to handle all necessary communications during
the mission. When the bomber was under attack however, he was
quick to man his own gun from the radio room hatch to ward off enemy fighters.

Behind the radio room and
beneath the fuselage hung the clear Plexiglas sphere of the Ball
Turret Gunner, a cramped and dangerous position critical to
defending the belly of the Flying Fortress. Above the Ball
Turret the two waist gunners manned their own fifties, defending
against attack from the left or right. Further back in the
tiny craw space beneath the vertical stabilizer the Tail Gunner
crouched at his own twin-fifties to protect the rear. These
six men comprised the enlisted component of the Flying Fortress
crew, and could ably protect their airplane from attack from any
direction left, right, above, below or behind.

The bomber's NAVIGATOR and
BOMBARDIER shared space in the vulnerable nose of the Flying
Fortress, one of the Luftwaffe pilots' favorite points of
attack. Each had specific duties in terms of plotting the
route and accurately deploying the bomb load, but both were quick to
defend their airplane with their own fifty-caliber
machineguns. It was estimated that the typical navigator spent
5% of his time navigating, 95% of his time behind his guns.
The same was true for the bombardier.

Only the pilot, in the
left-hand seat of the cockpit, and the co-pilot on his right, did
not have assigned and readily accessible machineguns to turn on
attacking enemy fighters. (In fact, some pilots such as Major
Jay Zeamer in the Pacific, went so far as to have forward-firing
machineguns mounted in the nose of their Fortress that could
be triggered from the cockpit.) Not infrequently did the
demands of intense combat necessitate the co-pilot leaving his
station to replace a killed or severely wounded comrade at one of
the many guns spread throughout the Flying Fortress.

These ten men were more than
just the "crew of an airplane"--they were a team.
"One word explains how we got through the hell over Europe 25
times--and back home without a casualty," stated Bob Morgan who
piloted the famed Memphis Belle. "TEAMWORK!" For
the most part, the squadrons of the Army Air Force maintained crew
integrity. The men were assigned together, slept in the same
billets (though officers and enlisted had separate tents or
buildings), and flew together except for those occasions when one
might be pulled to assist a separate crew when one of their members
was ill or injured.

First Blood

Twenty-four B-17s from the 97th
Bombardment Group flew the first American bombing raid in Europe on
August 17, 1942. The attack against the railroad marshalling
yards at Touen-Sotteville, France, was inauspicious, but did mark
the entrance of the U.S. Army Air Force's campaign to bomb Germany
into surrender. Five additional missions followed before the
end of the month, but like a swimmer dipping his toes into a pool,
they were more a testing of the waters than a strategic
offensive against a formidable enemy.

General Eaker's Eighth Air
Force built rapidly as new aircraft and crews arrived in
England. The 306th Bombardment Group flew its first mission on
October 9. This was the fourteenth mission of the Eighth Air
Force and would have been the first air mission flown by more than
100 bombers, had not 33 of the combined force of 84 Flying
Fortresses and 24 B-24 Liberators been forced to
abort. It was a sad turn of events, for the American Air Force
strategy for accomplishing their mission to destroy the Luftwaffe
and German war machine was predicated upon fielding large bomber
formation. There was safety in numbers, and continuing small
formation missions that were subject to interdiction by 100 or more
enemy fighters were becoming exceedingly dangerous.

By November 1 Allied war
planners were gearing up for Operation Torch, the amphibious
landings in North Africa that had been deemed immediately preferable
to, and as a prelude for, the much anticipated cross-channel
invasion of Northern France which was now postponed until
1944. To support these landings in the Mediterranean, Ira
Eaker's Mighty Eighth (Air Force) was stripped of four
bombardment and four fighter groups including more than 25,000
trained and combat-experienced airmen. The transfer of these
vital assets to the Twelfth Air Force in North Africa made it
impossible for the Eighth to field more than 50 - 75 bombers for any
mission for nearly six months thereafter.

Rebuilding the Eighth was slow,
despite the arrival of the 303d Bombardment Group, which flew its
first mission on November 17. With limited air assets
including protective fighter cover, nearly all Eighth Air Force
missions through the end of 1942 were conducted against targets on
the northern and western coast of France or nearby Holland.
With the exception of a December 20 mission to Romily, near Paris,
the flight path was brief and mostly over water. To venture to
far inland would put the bombers beyond the range of their fighter
escorts, and place them too long over territory controlled by the
Axis, protected by enemy fighters, and peppered by deadly flak
batteries on the ground.

Hitting Home

Following the swift success of
the North Africa campaign, President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill
met in French Morocco for the Casablanca Conference (January
14-24) to plan their next course of action. Though the
resulting strategy was to continue the Mediterranean campaign with
invasions of Sicily and then Italy to strike Germany from beneath,
never far from the minds of those developing the war plan was the
ultimate goal of the cross-channel invasion. Critical to the
success of that invasion was the neutralization of the Luftwaffe,
which might otherwise destroy the amphibious assault from the air,
long before landing craft reached the beaches of Northern France.

Ira Eaker's Eighth Air force
had experienced only limited success in its first thirty missions,
most of which were along the French coast, and had suffered
devastating losses as a result of enemy flak and fighters.
During the conference at Casablanca there was tremendous pressure
from British air commanders to force Eaker to abandoned his daylight
bombing and join the RAF in attacking German targets under cover of
darkness. Eaker successfully argued that his limited success
and high casualty rate were due more to the limited range of his
fighter cover and the smallness of his fielded formations, the
latter because of diversion of his assets to the North African
campaign, than to the dangers of daylight missions. He met
personally with Winston Churchill, and with great diplomatic tack
but determined zeal, convinced the Prime Minister that a campaign of
"around the clock bombing" would be versatile to the
Allied effort, damning to the enemy. Further, he promised that
his forces would strike Germany itself before the close of the
month.

General Eaker's men fulfilled
that promise on January 27, flying northeast out of England for the
first time to cross the North Sea and strike inside Germany, another
first. Ninety-one heavy bombers, Flying Fortresses
and B-24 Liberators, took off on that historic morning to attack
Wilhelmshaven (near Bremen) in Northern Germany. Though only 53
bombers from that force reached their target, it marked the moment
when the first American bombs exploded across the terrain of Germany
itself.

Despite one of the bitterest
winters in decades, the Eighth Air Force mounted thirty missions
over the first four months of 1942, including a strike at Vegesack,
Germany (near Bremen) on March 18 that was historic for two noticeable
reasons:

It was the first mission
flown and completed by a formation of American heavy bombers numbering more
than 100, and

It was on this mission that
First Lieutenant Jack Mathis of the 303d Bombardment Group's
359th Bomb Squadron became the first airman of the European war
to earn the Medal of Honor. The valiant and determined
bombardier sacrificed his life to insure the completion of his
mission.

Despite continuing heavy
losses, the arrival of new bombers and air crews enabled Ira Eaker
to mount larger and larger bombing formations. Soon flights were nearly equal
in number to the quantity of enemy fighters that rose to challenge them. Among the new arrivals was a young gunner named Maynard
Smith, whom everyone called Snuffy. On May 1 Snuffy Smith
became the second airman of the war in Europe to earn the Medal of
Honor, and the first enlisted airman in history to wear that high
honor.

Five new bombardment groups
were assigned to combat status in the Eighth Air Force in May,
giving Ira Eaker a total of fifteen bomb groups. On July 17
Ira Eaker was able to field his largest bombing mission to date and
the first to exceed 300 total bombers. It was only a
beginning.

Author Harold Mansfield noted
that prior to the Casablanca
Conference when his forces had been depleted by transfers to
the 12th Air Force "Ira Eaker
was wearying of small hits at nearby targets along the Channel. 'If
we can get the equipment, we can knock Germany out of the war from
the air,' he said. "By destroying Hitler's factories we
can put an end to his air force. By destroying his munitions plants
and communications we can stop his armies.'"

By July 1943, despite the
temporary transfer of three Eighth Air Force B-24 Liberator
Groups to the 9th Air Force in Libya for a top-secret mission (a
long-range, low-level bombing mission to Ploesti, Romania), General
Eaker at last had sufficient men and aircraft to mount his offensive
against Germany. When a week of frustratingly poor weather
lifted in the last week of July, he wasted little time in at last
mounting the kind of strategic bombing missions he had espoused for
nearly a year.

Little Blitz Week

Eighth Air Force Mission #75
was a stunning blow to the Axis war machine. In the first
bombing raid into Norway, 167 heavy bombers made the 1,900-mile
round-trip to attack the nitrate works at Heroya. It was the longest
bombing mission of the war to date, one totally unexpected by German
tacticians, and effectively put the important war plant out of
operation for nearly four months. Meanwhile, other bombers of
the 309 total force, attacked enemy naval installations at Trondheim,
as well as other targets at Bergen. Of the more than 300 bombers
launched at the opening of what would become known as Little
Blitz Week, only one was lost. Her crew nursed their
flak-damaged B-17 to Sweden where they landed without casualties,
and were interned.

While the Axis reeled from the
unprecedented strike that was later described as: "The most
successful and shrewdly planned and executed mission of the entire
war," General Eaker pressed his advantage. The
morning following the attack into Norway he sent 323 heavy bombers
across the North Sea to strike inside Germany, attacking the
shipyard at Hamburg and submarine base at nearby Kiel. This
time German fighter pilots were prepared however, and nineteen
American bombers were lost.

The trifecta was completed the
very next day when 303 heavy bombers were unleashed on the Reich,
again attacking at Hamburg with 54 bombers while other's penetrated
deeper into enemy territory to strike other targets. Nearly 100 Flying
Fortresses fought their way deep into the heart of Germany, the
92nd Bomb Group hitting the Continental Gummiwerke A.G.
Wahrenwalderstrasse tire plant at Hanover, just 150 miles west of
Berlin. It was a classic test of the as-yet-unproven aerial
warfare doctrine: "The well-organized, well-planned,
and well-flown air force (bombing) attack will constitute an
offensive that cannot be stopped."

For nearly a year the Eighth
Air Force had kept most of its missions near the coast where
formations would have less exposure to flak and fighter opposition
until minutes before they were over the target. Coastal
targets were often also within range of friendly fighter escort in
both directions. To bomb Hanover however, which was well beyond the
range of friendly fighters, after reaching the coast of Europe the
bombers had to fly over 100 miles of Nazi-controlled land to reach
their target--every mile filled with flak and enemy fighter
opposition. And then, to further complicate the secondary
mission of survival, the Flying Fortresses had to return home
across that same 100-mile gauntlet, still without friendly fighters
to keep the enemy from destroying them.

The well-organized,
well-planned and well-flown air force that attacked Hanover on July
26 did INDEED constitute an offensive that could not be stopped,
despite repeated attacks over the two hour inland flight to and from
target by more than 100 enemy fighters. The bombers got
through not because they were impressively armed however, so much as
they survived because of the teamwork and determination of their
crews. Enemy fighters had appeared almost as soon as the
formation made landfall, and one 92d BG Fortress named Ruthie
II was hit almost immediately, mortally wounding the pilot and
sending him into a frenzy. Co-pilot John Morgan held the
pain-crazed pilot at bay with one hand, while piloting Ruthie II on
to target to drop her bombs, and then return home. For his
incredible valor and determination Flight Officer Morgan became the
third airman of the Mighty Eighth to earn the Medal of Honor.

Two dozen other Fortresses
were not so fortunate, generating one of the deadliest days of the
air war to date. Of the more than 250 casualties killed, wounded, or
missing in action, sixty-five were later rescued from the North Sea
by British air-sea rescue teams after fighting their way out of
Germany only to drop from the sky in bombers too badly damaged to
reach Britain.

Tuesday was a day of rest
during Little Blitz Week but the following day the intrepid
airmen were back in the sky, fielding 302 bombers to attack even
deeper into Germany, striking the aircraft works at Kassel and the
Focke-Wulf factory at Oschersleben. It was a day full of
firsts--and surprises. Equipped with jettisonable belly tanks,
for the first time American P-47 fighters escorted the flights into
Germany ranging 30 miles further than on any previous escort
mission. Even at that, the American fighters eventually had to
depart, leaving the formation to slug its way alone on the deepest penetration
yet made into Germany. Twenty-two Fortresses were lost
when enemy fighters for the first time unleashed effective rocket
fire on them, but the returning survivors were met by a second group
of P-47 escorts while still deep inside Germany. These caught
sixty pursuing enemy fighters unprepared and destroyed nine of them
with the loss of only one American fighter.

On Wednesday, July 29, the
losses of four major missions in five days had begun to take its
toll, but General Eaker refused to relent. Nearly 250 heavy
bombers returned to Northern Germany to strike the submarine pens at
Kiel and the Heinkel aircraft factory at nearby Warnemunde. On
Thursday nearly 200 bombers again attacked deep into Germany,
striking the aircraft works at Kassel, again escorted most of the
way by P-47s with auxiliary fuel tanks that allowed them to surprise
enemy fighters unaccustomed to seeing American fighters beyond the
coastal fringe.

Little Blitz Week proved
to be the greatest sustained air offensive of the war to date, with
the combined bomber offensive taking a heavy toll on the
infrastructure necessary to Hitler's war machine. There was no
respite for the embattled enemy, for throughout that historic week
the R.A.F. bombed at night, often in formations of more than 500
aircraft, while General Eaker's airmen hit them in the daylight
hours, striking sixteen major industrial targets in six of the
seven-day period.

On July 31, despite clear
flying weather, the Eight Air Force at last rested. Little Blitz Week had at last proven the
validity of high-altitude, massive daylight bombardment, but at a
heavy cost. Eighty-eight heavy bombers had been lost and more
than 1,000 valiant airmen of the Mighty Eighth were dead, captured, or
missing. With nearly twenty more bombers damaged beyond repair
and others in need of substantial rebuilding, Eighth Air Force assets
had dropped from 330 B-17s seven days earlier, to fewer than 200. Though General Eaker was eager to continue pounding
the enemy, he knew it was time to heal the wounds and rebuild.
Not for two weeks would Eighth Air Force bombers based out of
England fly another major mission.

Meanwhile, however, on the
following day (August 1) the three Eighth Air Force Liberator groups
sent to Libya on loan to the Ninth Air Force made history when they
crossed the Mediterranean to strike the important oil refineries at
Ploesti, Romania.

Hell's Angels

Little Blitz Week with its
unprecedented success was possible only because at last the Eighth Air
Force had built up to the point that large bombing formations could be
fielded. The arrival of the 94th, 95th, 96th, 351st and 379th in
May, augmented by the 100th in June, made possible the 300+ heavy bomber
formations that wreaked havoc on Germany in the last week of July. As
important as this infusion of new planes and crews were to the Eighth
Air Force's missions, it was the veterans from bombardment groups that
had arrived months before that provided the experience and savvy
necessary to mission accomplishment. Among these was the veteran 303d
Bombardment Group. When the Eighth Air Force flew its eightieth
mission on July 30, the airmen of the 303d claimed credit for
participation in 56 of them, including the first mission over Germany
the previous January and five of the six Little Blitz Week
missions.

The 303d arrived in England in the
fall of 1942 to begin combat operations out of Molesworth, north of
London. They flew their first mission on November 17. Three more
missions followed within the week, and on the return from one of them
Captain Irl Baldwin, flying a B-17 with tail number 41-24577 but as yet
unnamed, mused aloud over the interphone about calling his bomber
"Hell's Angels." The mission had been a rough one for
his rookie crew, one of whom quickly stated, "Why not. This is the
closest to hell that angels will ever get!"

The
Flying Fortress #41-24577 indeed was named "Hell's
Angels" and thereafter, many of the men of the 303d began to refer
to their Bomb Group itself as "Hell's Angels," though the moniker
was not formally adopted until early in 1944. The veteran status
of the 303d was certainly verified on May 13, 1943, when "Hell's
Angels" became the first Eighth Air Force bomber to complete
twenty-five combat missions. The second Eighth Air Force bomber to
reach this milestone six days later was one of the most well-known
bombers of the war: "Memphis Belle."

Few heavy bombers, especially in
the first year of the air war, were fortunate enough to complete the
milestone twenty-fifth mission. By the time "Hell's Angels"
became the FIRST to do so, thirty bombers of the 303d had been lost in
34 combat missions. When the 303d's pilots and crews flew the
Group's fiftieth mission on July 14, ten days before Little Blitz
Week, that tally had risen to 38 lost bombers, more than four
hundred men dead or missing in action. In the summer of 1943 not
only did the Eighth Air Force need new bomber groups, her veteran Groups
were also desperately in need of replacements.

Sergeant Buske

Sergeant George W. Buske was one of
the replacements that arrived at Molesworth in the summer of 1943, where
he was assigned as Tail Gunner to the crew of 2nd Lieutenant Arni
Sumarlidason (back/right in the photo.) Sumarlidason was a veteran
with sixteen missions in the right-hand seat from May 4 to July 17 when
he was upgraded to pilot for his first mission in the left-hand
seat. That first mission as pilot was aborted and the crew
returned to Molesworth where weather grounded them for a week. During
that period they posed for a crew photo (seen here), and prepared for
the upcoming aerial offensive.

Lieutenant
Sumarlidason's crew flew on the first and second missions of Little
Blitz Week, their only missions until mid-August. The
first eleven days of August were a re-building time for the Eighth Air
Force, the opportunity to lick wounds, mourn lost comrades, and
repair battle-damaged bombers after sustaining more than 25% losses as a
result of the six missions in the last seven days of July. On
August 12 however, the Eighth Air Force was back in business.
Lieutenant Sumarlidason's crew joined 329 other heavy bombers on a
mission into the heart of Germany to attack inside the Ruhr.

The
target for Sumarlidason and the other 20 Fortresses from the 303d
was a synthetic oil plant at Gelsenkirchen. Lieutenant Bill McSween
recalled:

"I was a mite uncertain
about the outcome of this one. The target was in the center of a
valley where there was no way around anything. We flew straight
through up to the Ruhr defenses, where all hell broke loose. Talk
about 'intense and accurate flak!' They made us know it. Flak rattled
off the plane's nose like hail. The target area was obscured and our
bombs went wild. Focke-Wulfs attacked outside the Ruhr defenses and
hit the high and lead groups."

The mission to Gelsenkirchen was a
running battle all the way to target and then trying to fight out of
the valley to return home. In the tail of Sumarlidason's B-17,
twenty-two year old Sergeant George Buske hammered away at the attackers
while his comrades at the waist, the top and lower turrets, and the two
officers in the nose fought to defend their airplane. The 303d
lost only one airplane and crew on the deadly mission, but other
bombardment groups were not so fortunate. Of the 330 heavy bombers
that made that first mission of the new offensive, 243 reached and
bombed their targets. Twenty-five American bombers and 250 valiant
airmen did not return.

The
Mighty Eighth stood down for two days after the tragic losses and fierce
fighting of August 12. General Eaker understood the value of
continued bombardment of targets inside Germany, but it was also apparent
that he could not continue in the face of such heavy casualties. Little
Blitz Week had shaken the confidence of Hitler's air chiefs and
scores of enemy fighter planes had been moved from the Eastern Front to
air fields in France, Holland and Belgium to interdict future bombing
raids before they could reach the homeland.

These
airfields and their fighters became the new priority for attack.
On August 15 the Eighth Air Force dispatched more than 300 bombers to
attack enemy fighters on the ground along the coast. The
formations were escorted by Spitfires all the way, and though flack was
heavy, losses were light and few enemy fighters were seen in the
air. The following day more than 200 bombers attacked airfields
near Paris, again escorted all the way to target and home by P-47s with
drop tanks. In the tail of Lieutenant Sumarlidason's Flying
Fortress Sergeant Buske experienced a largely uneventful fourth
combat mission, as again few enemy fighters even got into the air.

The
heavy losses of August 12 in comparison to the missions of August 15 and
16 vividly demonstrated the value of fighter escort if daylight bombing
was to continue. In the latter two-day period a total of 573 bombers had
been dispatched, of which 527 reached and bombed their targets.
Only six bombers had been lost. The problem was in finding a
fighter with sufficient range to escort bombing missions into Germany--a
challenge that was being confronted at home and that would be answered
before the end of the year by the new P-51 Mustang.

Double Punch

The
mission of Wednesday, August 16, marked the completion of the Eighth Air
Force's first year of aerial combat in Europe, 365 days during which
General Eaker's men had flown 83 missions. The price of their
limited victories had been expensive, 411 bombers lost, more than 4,000
airmen killed, captured, or missing; and hundreds more recovering from
serious wounds.

For
Sergeant George Buske the Mighty Eighth's anniversary sortie of August
17 would mark his fifth combat mission, authorizing award of the Air
Medal. For the enemy it meant an unprecedented two-prong assault
at targets the high command considered untouchable. For the
gunners of the Flying Fortresses it would mean the most intense
aerial combat of the war. For the crews of sixty bombers it would
mark the end of their war.

In
all a total of 376 bombers were fielded to attack the ball bearing
factories at Schweinfurt and the German Messerschmidt complex at
Regensburg, the latter marking the deepest penetration into Germany to
date. A record 724 tons of bombs fell from the 315 heavy bombers
that fought their way through enemy fighters to reach their
targets. At Regensburg virtually every major building was hit and
scores of newly-completed Me-109 fighters were destroyed on the
ground. Then the Flying Fortresses did the
unexpected. Rather than turning back to fight their way home to
England, they turned south to cross the Mediterranean and land in North
Africa. It was the first Eighth Air Force shuttle mission of the
war, setting a precedent for future missions deep into the heart of
Germany to eventually attack the Axis from two directions.

Martin
Caiden in Flying Forts recalls the determination of the men who
flew the deadly mission to reach and bomb Regensberg:

"In the B-17 named X
Virgin a waist gunner was killed by German fighters. Internal systems
were slashed and cut by enemy fire. In an unprecedented move, four men
chose to bail out deliberately (over German held territory) so that
the remaining crew would have enough oxygen to take the ship over the
target and return. Over the target the bomb-release mechanism failed
to work...

"But
a wounded gunner felt he hadn't come all this way for nothing. He left
his guns and worked his way to the bomb bay. With a screwdriver he
loosened the shackles and then jumped up and down on the bombs until
they broke loose and fell free.

Sergeant Buske's Fortress,
along with 28 others from Hell's Angels, hit the ball bearing
plants at Schweinfurt. The important industry there provided 40%
of the critical bearings for the Axis war machine, and on this day
though the damage was not as heavy as that inflicted on Regensburg, two
major factories were damaged and production greatly hampered. It
was little comfort for the heavy losses sustained. Lady
Luscious tail gunner Sergeant Merlin Miller recalled the running
fight home after his Fortress had dropped its bombs:

"Half a dozen (enemy)
fighters, maybe more, would get behind us and string out, and com in
one right after the other at our group. It got so that we could just
pick out the fighters to shoot at that looked like they were coming
directly at us.

"There
were parachutes too, many parachutes floating through the air,
sometimes through the formation, white ones that the Americans had,
dirty colored ones that the Germans had. You could see, oh, 40 to 60
parachutes in the air at once sometimes. And sometimes there'd be
pieces of planes just floating through the formation from blown-up
bombers, blown-up fighters, long columns of smoke from the ground,
going down to the ground and coming up from the ground. You could see
where we'd been, actually follow our track over the mission just by
looking back and following the columns of smoke coming up from the
ground. It was incredible!"

None of the falling bombers
witnessed by Sergeant Miller came from the 303d; all twenty B-17s sent
to attack Schweinfurt returned home, many heavily damaged, but all still
intact. Nevertheless, twenty-four bombers from other groups that
attacked Schweinfurt, and thirty-six bombers from the Regensburg task
force, were shot down in combat. Returning airmen reported shooting down
a total of 288 enemy fighters. There is no estimating how many
additional fighters might have been shot down by the 600 American airmen
who never returned. Furthermore, while the number of enemy fighters destroyed
may have been somewhat exaggerated or erroneous, it certainly gives
evidence to the unusually high number of German fighters fielded
unsuccessfully to thwart the double-punch Eighth Air Force anniversary
mission. Mission #84 that fielded 376 bombers to attack targets
deep into Germany demonstrated how far Ira Eaker's determined airmen had
come since that first mission 365 days earlier when twenty-five Fortresses
flew fifty miles across the English Channel to drop bombs at the coastal
city of Rouen, France.

Beware,
the Easy Mission

The heavy losses of the
Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission forced Ira Eaker once again to
concentrate on missions closer to home while new aircraft and crews
streamed into England to replace the mounting tally of missing men and machines.
From August 19 until September 6, the earliest date on which Eaker could
again mount a massive strike into Germany, the Eighth Air Force
concentrated on short strikes against coastal installations while
constantly under escort by P-47 fighters. In all, during that
three week period of near-daily strikes, losses were under 4%--again
validating the value of fighter cover to bomber operations. The light
losses however, are no indication that these quick hops across the
English Channel were Milk Runs for bomber pilots or their crews.

Two days after the Schweinfurt
mission Sergeant Buske crouched in the tail of his Flying Fortress
as it crossed the channel to attack enemy air fields near the Holland
coast at Gilze-Ruen. Twenty bombers from the 303d were the tail
formation of a 93-bomber force that expected a quick run to target and a
relatively easy return home--all under the protective care of dedicated
fighter pilots.

Upon reaching the coast Buske found
himself busy fighting off the ME-109s that rose to meet the incoming
formation, but comforted himself in the knowledge that the bombers would
only be over enemy territory for half-an-hour before turning back across
the channel for home field. Then, it seemed, everything went
wrong.

The lead bomber, which was to mark
the target under the prevailing "bomb on the leader" technique
that had been a staple of such missions since early in the year, failed
to unleash his payload. The mission leader circled, leading the
bombers around for a second pass and doubling the time that the
formation would be under the sights of anti-aircraft gunners on the
ground and enemy fighter pilots around them.

Crouching
in the tail of his B-17 on this, his sixth combat mission, Sergeant
Buske unloaded on the attacking enemy fighters with grim
determination. As he tracked on yet another incoming enemy he
suddenly felt the tail shudder under the impact of a 20mm shell that
ripped holes in thin metal and tore through the flesh of his hip.
Blood streamed from the open wound, but with danger still everywhere
around him, Sergeant Buske gritted his teeth against the pain and
continued to fire. He shot down one enemy fighter and warded off
several more. Not until the last fighters had disappeared while the Hell's Angels formation headed out over the channel to return
to Molesworth, did he give in to his serious injuries and cease
defending his airship.

For his heroic actions and
determination on that day when two Hell's Angels bombers failed
to return home, Sergeant Buske was awarded his first Purple Heart, an
Oak Leaf Cluster to his Air Medal, and the Silver Star. For the
next forty-five days he was confined to the hospital for treatment of
the wound in his hip.

By September Ira Eaker's three Liberator
Groups had returned from their secret mission in Libya and the continued
flow of new airmen and aircraft from the United States had nearly
brought his B-17 strength up to seventeen full Groups. On
September 6 he dispatched 407 bombers, his largest force yet, to bomb
targets at Stuttgart, Germany. Little more than half of the force
reached their target and forty-five bombers were lost in aerial combat
including two Hell's Angels bombers and crews. The mission
served notice to the enemy that the Eighth, despite continuing heavy
casualties, was prone to strike inside the homeland at any time, though
following the September 6 mission the Mighty Eighth resumed primarily
anti-aircraft missions into occupied territory.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Buske was
released from the hospital early in October to return Molesworth, while
rookie replacements continued to arrive in England to keep the Eighth
Air Force at fighting strength. Among the new arrivals was the
young radio man from Sergeant Buske's home state of New York who became
one of Hell's Angels on October 8.

Forrest L.
Vosler

Forrest Lee Woody
Vosler was born July 29, 1923, in the small Lake Ontario town
of Lyndonville, New York, just fifty miles west of Sergeant
Buske's home town of Rochester. At age 8 with his parents
William and Lottie Vosler, two sisters and brother, the family
moved to Avon and then later to Livonia, where Woody attended high
school. At 6'3" he was a somewhat accomplished as a
basketball player.

Woody developed
a sense of duty and honor as a Boy Scout, earning his Star Scout
award but falling short in his efforts to become an Eagle
Scout. Those early experiences shaped much of his
personality. Following graduation from Livonia's Central High
School in 1941, Woody continued with scouting as an Assistant
Scoutmaster for his troop.

When war was
declared in December 1941, Woody was eighteen years old and
working as a drill press operator for the Rochester Products
Division of General Motors. Over the following months he watched
with interest as several of his older friends were drafted into
service, and following his 19th birthday decided he wanted to
voluntarily follow in their footsteps. At the time, however, only
young men over age 21 were being drafted, and Woody had to obtain
his father's signature before visiting the Army Air Force
recruiter to enlist for pilot training. This he did, joining
the Army in Rochester on October 8, 1942.

Woody
found his dreams of piloting an Army bomber overly optimistic--his
scores on the initial pilot qualification tests were
substandard. The recruiter who accepted the eager young man
into the military broke the bad news to him with the announcement
that, though he could not serve as a pilot, Woody was going
to be assigned other military duties. Disappointed, Woody
returned home and called his father to announce, "You've
got to get me out of this damned thing you signed for."

"What's
the matter," he later recalled his father
responding. "Are you afraid to go in (the
army)?"

To demonstrate
otherwise, Woody accepted his fate, becoming a private in
the Army Air Force.

After aptitude
testing, during which Woody scored high for radio training,
and after basic training in Atlantic City, NJ, Woody Vosler
was assigned to the Radio Operators and Mechanics School at Scott
Air Field in Illinois for eighteen weeks of intense instruction.
There, in addition to training in radio procedures, equipment, and
Morse Code, he probably heard something akin to the official spiel
later published in the U.S.
Army Air Force pamphlet titled: Combat Crew:

THE RADIO OPERATOR

"A day
will come in combat when the job of getting home is up to
the radio operator. Maybe you'll be heading into a British
airport in radio silence--and have to flash a blinker signal
or else the guns below will start popping ack-ack.
Maybe you'll be floating in the South Pacific on a life
raft--and your ability to handle the emergency equipment
will decide how long you'll play with the sharks.

"Maybe
you'll get in a jam like me--somewhere north of Kiska. We
were on the run home--and the fog rolled up like it was made
of jello--frozen jello. The only hope we had was the radio
compass and it turns out the navigator had never been
introduced to the gadget. These were the early days of the
war. Officially, I knew nothing about it--but one night when
I was too busted to get in the poker game, I got out the
tech orders on the compass and ran over them--just to kill a
couple hours.

"I
didn't know much--but what I knew got us back--through a fog
so thick that we were not sure we had hit the home field
till we started bouncing. The navigator knew his compass the
next trip. People learn quick in combat--if they live.

"The
idea is to learn before you get in combat. Most of you, here
from radio school, will make the discovery that there is a
lot of difference between code speed on the ground--and in
the air. I hate to see a man go into combat who can't handle
20 words a minute under the worst possible conditions. That
is more than regulations require--but the extra speed builds
up confidence. Know your equipment--and how to keep it in
shape. Brush up on the blinker codes--communications
signals, you are going to use in action.

"Summing
up, speed up your code taking, understand the basic
principles of radio, be able to use the radio compass and
other navigational aids, play with your frequency modifier
until its operation becomes second nature--and master your
gun. You won't be the weak link in the crew."

Published in
1944 by the 2d Air Force and Training Aids Division
U.S. Army Air Forces

Woody did
very well at the radio training, was promoted to Private First Class on
March 4, 1943, and then to Sergeant on March 24 while still undergoing
classes. He met all requirements but one in order to become
radioman on an Army Air Force bomber. Every man of a bomber crew
was a gunner, following specialty training with Flexible Gunnery
School. Woody's future appeared to keep him on the ground,
perhaps sheltered in an aircraft control tower. He later recalled:

"Because of
my height, six feet three inches, I couldn't get into flying status.
The limit at the time was 72 inches, so when I went back to take the
physical to get into flying, I didn't really have much hope of making
it in because of the height limitation.

"I happened
to arrive there at the noon hour, and I was waiting; everybody went to
lunch. All the officers and doctors were at lunch and I had to sit
there in my shorts waiting for them to come back. I noticed that the
height and weight man had brought a box lunch and he was eating it
instead of going out with the rest of them. I walked over to him
and said, 'You measure the height and weight?' He
said, 'Yes, I do.'
I said, 'I've got a five dollar bill here if
you put down 72 inches on my form.'
He said, 'You're on.'
I handed him the five dollars and I'm on my
way to Harlingen, Texas.

"I got down
to Harlingen, Texas, and I was going to get another physical: they
gave you a physical every time you moved. I bumped my head going in to
get the physical. There was a captain standing there. He said, 'Just a
minute sergeant. Come over here. How the heck did you get down here?
I've seen hundreds of people go through this door and they don't bump
their head if they are under six feet.'

"I told him
the story. He made me get up on the scales and got the height down.
They finally recorded it as six feet one and one-half inches. He sat
down and said, 'I don't know.'

"I said,
'I'll tell you, sir, what I'm NOT going to do. I'm not going to
bribe you. I know better than that.'

"He laughed
and said, 'You really want it, don't you?'
I said, 'I certainly do.'
He said, 'I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to give you a crack at it. The only reason we limit (the
height) is because we think you can't get in the turrets, and you must
be able to do all the positions on the ship. If you can do them
somehow, more power to you. If you can't, you're going to wash out
anyway, but you're welcome to try."

Black
Week

When Staff Sergeant Woody
Vosler arrived at Molesworth, on flight status and fully capable
of manning any of the positions on a Flying Fortress on
Friday, October 8, twenty-two Hell's Angels were on a
mission to Bremen, Germany. It was the opening day of a new
week of blitzes inside Germany, but this week would be remembered
with a far more ominous title that its predecessor of July.
It would come to be called, with good reason, Black Week.

Vosler was assigned his
billets, a low, drab building where several enlisted crewman slept
on three-piece RAF 'biscuit' mattresses. In later interviews
he recalled meeting three of his roommates, though he couldn't
recall their names. Since individual air crews normally
bunked together, these were probably the men with whom he was
intended to serve in the coming months, most probably the enlisted
men of the B-17 Shades of Stricnine.

The mood at Molesworth was
somber that evening, for although all 22 Hell's Angels
returned safely from the day's raid over Bremen, it had been a
tough mission. Heavy flak damaged sixty percent of the
3d Bombardment Division's participating bombers, and 75% of the
1st Division's aircraft. Thirty of the 357 bombers launched
that morning were lost, and twenty-six more were damaged almost
beyond repair.

Staff Sergeant Vosler
awakened to an empty hut the following morning. New
replacements were not immediately committed to battle, but first
received days, or even weeks, of training and preparations before
the first combat mission. The crew of Shades of Stricnine
however, had found their number on the roster for the day's
mission to Anklam, Germany...their fourth since arriving at
Molesworth the previous month.

By nightfall the barracks was
still quite empty. Lieutenant B. J. Clifford's Shades of
Stricnine was last seen gliding into the clouds near the
Danish coast with its wheels down, one of the left wings smoking,
and enemy fighters continuing their attack. The entire crew
was killed in action, a vivid lesson to Forrest Vosler on his
second day at Molesworth as to the danger of being an American
airman at war in Europe. Twenty seven other Eighth Air Force
bombers went down that same day.

Sunday was no day of rest for
the Eighth Air Force as 275 bombers, including 21 Hell's
Angels, were launched to attack targets inside Germany for the
third straight day. Though all Hell's Angels again
returned safely home, the Eighth Air Force lost 30 bombers
bringing the three day sum of losses to 87, with an equal number
severely damaged.

No where were the tragic
losses of October 10 felt more severely than at nearby Thorpe
Abbotts, home of the 100th Bombardment Group that had fielded
twenty bombers that morning to attack the railroad yards at
Munster, Germany. Seven were forced to abort, but an unlucky
thirteen continued towards their target deep in the Ruhr.
The limited-range P-47 escort was forced to turn back when the
thirteen 100th BG Fortresses, which were the lead for this
mission, were nine minutes from target. Almost immediately
more than 200 enemy fighters pounced on the B-17s, in minutes
shooting down twelve and leaving only Lieutenant Joe Rosenthal's Rosie's
Riveters to continue. Despite the odds against him from
continuing attacks that put a rocket through the right wing,
knocked out the #3 engine, and destroyed the oxygen system, Lieutenant
Rosenthall continued to target.

Loren Darling and John
Shaffer, the two waist gunners, were shot up badly. The tail
gunner was hit in the butt and the top turret gunner collected a
nick between the eyes while he was busy destroying two enemy
fighters, which were seen to burst in flames. A third was
destroyed by the radio operator. After the assaults had ceased,
all moveable equipment was thrown overboard and Rosie brought his
bomber home - alone. Rosie's
Riveters was all that remained of
the 100th Bomb Group formation after a day’s air battle, and thereafter
the Group was called the Bloody One Hundredth.

Black
Thursday

In Forrest Vossler's first
three days at Molesworth he had witnessed the departure of bombers
each day to attack deep into enemy territory. No doubt he
struggled with his own fears, for the moment must surely come soon
when he would be assigned to one of those departing Flying
Fortresses. No doubt he also remembered well the
words of the instructors at Radio school: "A day will come
in combat when the job of getting home is up to the radio
operator," and prayed that he would be equal to the
challenge. Before that moment came however, he remained a
spectator to the war, grounded at Molesworth to witness one of the
most tragic days in Air Force history.

During World War II some
forty missions were launched against the important bearing
factories at Schweinfurt, beginning with the deadly Eight Air
Force anniversary mission of August 17 that had cost two
dozen American bombers. The second mission to Schweinfurt on
October 14 was even costlier. Of 257 Flying Fortresses that
flew into the heart of Germany, twenty-eight went down to flak or
enemy fighters before reaching their targets. Fighting their way
home another thirty-one bombers went down, with one badly damaged Fortress
forced to ditch in the English Channel. Five bombers that
reached England were unable to land. The crews of three
parachuted to safety, two others crash-landed. Added to the
sixty-five lost bombers were seventeen more that were so badly
shot up they would never fly again. With eighty-two
B-17s stricken from the Eighth Air Force inventory in a single
day, and nearly 1,000 casualties, the pressure was on to get new
air crews built from the recent arrivals. Staff Sergeant
Vossler's moment was at last upon him.

Jersey
Bounce, Jr.

They call it that
Jersey bounce,
A rhythm that really counts;
The temperature always mounts,
Wherever they play,
the funny rhythm they play.

One of the original B-17s
assigned to the 303d Bombardment Squadron had been named Jersey
Bounce from the title of a popular song penned by Buddy Feyne.
The stout Flying Fortress flew 14 combat missions with the
303d before being transferred to the 384 Bomb Group. Jersey
Bounce, Jr. soon followed when B-17F #42-29664 was assigned to
the 303d on March 21, 1943. The name was a foregone
conclusion for, though over the bomber's nearly one-year of combat
it was flown on 32 missions by 9 different pilots, no man flew her
more times (7 missions) than Captain Robert Nolan who as a
Lieutenant, had christened the first Jersey Bounce.

Among
the distinguished list of men who had flown into harm's way aboard Jersey
Bounce, Jr. was Captain Merle Hungerford, who
had served with the 303d in various capacities for nearly a
year. In
an air force that practiced crew integrity, Captain Hungerford had
been a floater that filled in where needed. The versatile
air officer flew his first mission as a co-pilot on January 13,
and followed up with four additional combat missions in the
right-hand seat of a Flying Fortress in the months that
followed. During Little Blitz Week he participated in one
mission, flying as co-pilot on the July 29 mission over Heligoland
Island off the North coast of Germany. In all he logged eight
missions in the right-hand seat with five different pilots. On the
October 10 mission into Germany Jersey Bounce, Jr. had led
the formation with Major Mark Mitchell as pilot, Captain Merle
Hungerford as co-pilot.

On October 26 Captain
Hungerford was upgraded to pilot, but before flying his first
mission in the left-hand seat of the cockpit, he flew one more
mission in Jersey Bounce, Jr. with Major Mitchell.
Prior to departing Molesworth for that November 5 mission to
Gelsenkirchen, Germany, Hungerford and Mitchell posed in front of
their trusty bomber with the crew, among them Jersey Bounce's replacementTail Gunner, Sergeant
George Buske (lower left in photo above.) Having recovered
from his wounds ten weeks earlier, the scrappy kid from Rochester,
New York was back in action.

Six days later Captain
Hungerford posed for another crew photo, this time in front of the
B-17 named Sky Wolf. The bomber's assigned pilot was
a newly arrived replacement, Second Lieutenant John
Henderson. Though new to the Hell's Angels, Henderson
was a savvy veteran in the air. He had been flying since age
16 and with his brother had owned an airport in California. Before
the United States entered the war Henderson had flown with
Canada's RCAF, becoming a flight officer. When the U.S. Army
Air Force entered the war Henderson was given the rank of Staff
Sergeant and had to go through USAAF flight training again to earn
his commission and right to pilot a B-17 bomber. Sky Wolf's
assigned co-pilot was 2d Lieutenant Walter Ames who had washed out
of fighter pilot training. He was to miss the crew's first
five missions, so Captain Hungerford was assigned fill in as an
instructor pilot for the new crew's first missions. Sky Wolf's
radio man was a tall, 20-year old recently arrived replacement,
Staff Sergeant Forrest Woody Vosler.

Ball Turret Gunner Sergeant
Ed Ruppel recalled that original crew and the preparations they
were given for their first taste of combat action:

"We were supposed
to be replacements for the Schweinfurt raids, but we didn't put
any combat missions in right away. They took us by truck to
gunnery training at a place called 'The Wash' on the coast of England.

"When we got there
they took us into this big room, and the man said: 'Everything
you've ever learned in the States, forget about it. You don't
know nothing! We're going to teach you now what it's all about.

"This guy says,
'First of all, we're going to give you how long you're going to
live.' And he went through each gun position, and he told us how
long that guy would live. I forget how long he said the man in
the ball would live, but it was very short. The two most
vulnerable spots were the tail and the waist guns. A waist
gunner had something like two to three minutes in combat. They
said that combat could be three seconds, one pass and it was all
over for you. It was all very hard-core.

"At the end they
explained the reason they were telling us this. The man said,
'All of you that don't want to go into combat, step over on the
side. Nobody's going to holler at you, nobody's going to knock
you down or anything, I just want to know now.'

"So somebody raised
his hand and said, 'Why the hell are you so interested in that?'

"The man said, 'I
want to know now that you're going to quit. I don't want you to
quit when you're upstairs, and mess nine other people up.
Understand?'

"Then they started
to teach us what it was all about. We were out there for days,
going through various stages. In the last stage we fired
.50-calibers at various silhouettes that were set up. Then we
went back to Molesworth to fly practice missions with
instructors to show us what we were doing wrong. When we
finished, they figured we were ready for combat.

At age 19 Staff Sergeant
William Simkins was youngest member of the crew. He was also the
bomber's Engineer, one of the most critical
positions. He recalled the crew's first loss:

"Our tail gunner
quit after our first mission. He just up and said he didn't want
to fly anymore. We got George Buske as a replacement. He was an
experienced gunner who had flown before, and he hung around with
Ralph Burkart, our right waist gunner. Burkart was from
Columbus, Ohio.

"Our left waist
gunner was a guy named Stan Moody, from Maine. He was a real gun
expert, a gunsmith or something. He hunted in the woods a lot
and used to fool with guns all the time. Our bombardier was
Woodrow Monkres from Oklahoma--small but tough. And our
navigator was Warren Wiggins, from Long Island. He could really
get you around.

From Half a
Wing, Three Engines and a Prayer
By Brian D. O'Neill

The Battle of
Bremen

November 26, 1943

Thirty-five Hell's Angels bombers
lifted off from the airfield at Molesworth on the morning of
November 26, the largest 303d Flying Fortress formation in
more than a year of aerial combat. The sizable combat group
was possible because of all the new crews that had arrived and
been trained, including Lieutenant John Henderson and his men who
on this day flew into combat in the legendary bomber named Hell's
Angels. On this first mission for the new crew, Captain
Merle Hungerford flew in the right-hand seat as
Instructor/co-pilot.

Nine wings of Eight Air Force airplanes, 505
heavy bombers in all, were destined to deliver a decisive blow
against enemy installations at Bremen, Germany. Simultaneously,
another 128 bombers were to assault industrial targets near
Paris. With 633 heavy bombers in the air it was the largest,
single-day American air mission yet mounted. Flying escort were
353 P-47s and 28 P-38s, the aerial armada numbering nearly 1,000
total aircraft.

Due to high clouds the formation had to
climb to 27,500 feet where the cold winter air was at least -50
degrees. Beyond the dangers of ice building up on windows to obscure
visibility were the far more dangerous heavy white contrails that
steamed behind each bomber in formation. Such contrails
provided a virtual smoke screen that might allow enemy
fighters to slip up on the tails of the formation without being
seen, to render deadly fire.

Indeed more than 50 enemy fighters hit the
lead formations, Fortresses from the 303d, as soon as it
passed the coast. The running battle lasted more than an
hour as enemy FW-190s, Me-109s, and rocket-firing Me-110s attacked
in packs. In Hell's Angels Lieutenant Henderson's
crew experienced combat for the first time, save for the veteran
tail gunner. In the Ball Turret Sergeant Ruppel kept up a
steady stream of fire. "They (enemy fighters) tried
to hide in the vapor trails left by the Forts and sneak up without
being seen," he later recalled. "I saw three or
four of them try this, but it didn't seem to work too well.
The gunners drove them off as soon as they came out in the
open."

Busily attending his radio, Sergeant Vosler
suddenly noticed that the waist guns had fallen silent.
Looking in that direction he saw Sergeants Moody and Burkart
lying silent on the floor. Hell's Angels' oxygen
system had failed, rendering the gunners unconscious even as enemy
fighters continued their attack. Without hesitation Woody
grabbed portable oxygen bottles and rushed to the waist to
revive his comrades. The action subsequently earned him the
Air Medal.

The Bremen bombers and fighters slugged it
out with the enemy to claim a total of 70 enemy planes shot down,
but at the cost of 22 Flying Fortresses, 3 Liberators,
and 4 P-47s. It was the opening of a campaign dubbed the
Battle of Bremen. Eighth Air Force bombers returned to
Bremen again three days later, and then three more times in
December. Of the eight missions major missions flown by the
Eighth Air Force from November 26 until December 16, four were strikes
at Bremen. Along the way Lieutenant Henderson's crew
added two more missions to their growing tally.

The Battle for Bremen, and the last mission
flown against the enemy installations there until June of the
following year, culminated with the mission mounted on December
20.

December
20, 1943

Cold, winter storms blanketed
England in rain and fog for much of December. In the first nineteen days
of the month only five major missions had been possible for the men of
the Mighty Eighth, two of them return trips to Bremen. The
formations had been massive; on December 13 nearly 650 heavy bombers hit
Bremen. Three days later 535 dropped bombs on the enemy
installation that was now a virtual moonscape.

Enemy fighter activity had been
unexpectedly light and, for the first time the heavy bombers were
escorted all the way to target and home by newly arrived, long-range
P-51 fighters. Casualties had also been light, only five bombers
lost in combat on December 13, twelve three days later. Of sixty
bombers fielded by the 303d Bomb Group for both missions, all had
returned safely home. The missions were in fact, as was EVERY mission,
filled with the potential for disaster and sudden death. But on
the two previous trips to Bremen the scariest moments had come not over
Germany, but on the return to England where the runways had been
socked in by fog while the bombers were away.

Clearing skies on the evening of
the 19th gave hope for flying the following day and VIII Bomber Command
was alerted for a maximum effort. Nearly 500 heavy bombers were
scheduled to return to Bremen, twenty-one of them from the 303d
including Lieutenant Henderson and his crew in Jersey Bounce,
Jr. Based on light resistance encountered in the previous two
missions the men didn't expect the surprising resistance that rose to
turn them back. The Group Pro Report for the day, filed after the
mission had been completed, took note of this fact:

"Bremen again
was subject to demolishing by the US AAF heavy bombers (today.)
This important large port in Northern Germany is becoming
hamburgered by large formations of Flying Fortresses dropping
their destruction to carry on the eliminatin of the German war
machine. Unlike the last few times our big bombers went to
Bremen, today's mission proved to be one of the roughest our
crews had been on. Flak has generally been very intensive over
Bremen, but today the combination of flak and German fighters
did their best to prevent our formation from bombing.

"They were not
successful."

Shortly after dawn the bombers at
Molesworth and other airfields across England began taking off into the
crisp morning skies. Lieutenant Henderson took his team aloft in Jersey
Bounce, Jr., shortly before 8:30 am and climbed for altitude.
Captain Merle Hungerford rode in the right-hand seat as Instructor
Pilot/Co-pilot. The crew, now flying their fourth mission, was the
same group of men that had posed together in front of Sky Wolf
more than a month earlier (save for assigned co-pilot Lieutenant Ames
who had yet to join the team.)

For nearly two hours the bombers
climbed for altitude, circling over England as more bombers took off to
create the massive aerial formation. By 10:40 nearly 500 Flying
Fortresses and B-24 Liberators headed northeast and left
behind the coastal boundaries of Great Britain for the half-hour trek
over the North Sea.

The leading squadrons crossed the
coastline of Holland at 11:06 am, and the first enemy fighters attacked
twelve minutes later. Pilots of the leading squadron of the 303d
reported more than 100 enemy aircraft that moved in to turn back the
raid. It was a running battle that lasted for 58 minutes.

The 303d mission summary noted: "Attacks
were made by rocket-firing ME-210s and JU-88s from six o'clock level at
1000 yards. Me-210s dropped bombs about the size of a dynamite stick
from 500 feet above. They were dropped when the plane dipped its nose.
All sticks exploded at once. Attacks were made in squadron formation
from two o'clock high on one aircraft. These enemy pressed the attack to
within 100 yards. Two attacks were reported as coming from three o'clock
level. T/E fighters continued their attacks into the target area. One
aircraft reported enemy aircraft flying in formation about 100 yards out
and then pressing attack and breaking down under our aircraft to the
other side and continuing same tactics. The attacks from the side were
made in pairs and sometimes in groups of three or four."

The 303d Group leader was Captain
Don Gamble in Sky Wolf who recalled: "We were doing fine
until we started our bomb run. The formation was perfect. As soon as we
got over the target they smashed hell out of us. That flak was plenty
accurate and there was lots of it. Our (fighter) escort tried to keep
the (enemy) fighters out, but they sneaked through the contrails where
we couldn't see them."

Diving enemy fighters and erupting
clouds of flak began to break up the formation as the Fortresses
prepared to drop their bombs. An Me-100 angled sharply to attack
the bomber flown by 427th Squadron pilot Lieutenant Franklin Leve,
moving within fifty feet before unleashing its ordnance. Two
rockets struck between the ball turret and the tail forcing the bomber
pilot to dive sharply. Only two of the crew survived the crash
landing.

Almost simultaneously flak
knocked out one engine of Second Lieutenant Alexander Alex's Santa
Anna. All but two of the crew were on their first combat mission.
For all of them it was the last. Enemy fighters dove on the
crippled bomber forcing the crew to bail out before the B-17 crashed
near Bremen. The two wing gunners and tail gunner were wounded,
but survived to be interned as Prisoners of War for eighteen months.

Jersey Bounce, Jr.
miraculously evaded the hail of flack from below and the onslaught of
fighters all around to reach the target where Lieutenant Monkres announced "Bombs Away." Almost immediately
Lieutenant Henderson turned his bomber in a 180-degree turn to
head north, away from the inferno and over the North Sea. While
making that adjustment to retreat at 300-miles-per-hour the
sturdy bomber that had survived 28 combat missions shuddered and began
to lose power.

In the ball turret Ed Ruppel looked
away from his gun sights long enough to see holes in the left wing, and
flames streaming from the No. 1 engine. "Pilot, No. 1 is on
fire," he shouted into the interphone as he swiveled the turret
to examine the rest of the bomber from below. "Everything else
appears to be okay," he announced a moment later, "but
No. 1 is still on fire."

Lieutenant Henderson rolled over on
his flaming left wing, opened the cowling flaps on the flaming No. 1
engine, and moments later the fire was extinguished leaving little more
than a trail of smoke behind the wing. There was no time for a
sigh of relief, for Jersey Bounce was now outside the protection
of the larger formation. She continued her sluggish dive when power dropped on the
right right wing. The No. 3 engine began spewing smoke and, though the blades were
turning, it wasn't putting out any power.

Jersey Bounce continued to
dive and Ed Ruppel recalled those terrifying moments. "As I
glanced off to my right, I could see four or five B-17s being attacked
by fighters. There was one B-17 that was pretty close to us. They cut
one of his wings off and he went into a tight roll. Then they went after
the others. They just kept pecking away until they got them all. They
chopped up one ship, and another, they hit a third one, and then they
went to work on a plane over to our left, and cut him up...I knew that
when the fighters were finished with them we were next."

When Jersey Bounce was down
to 15,000 feet Ruppel recalled, "It seemed like the entire
German Luftwaffe was down there with us."

Suddenly, there was a sound as if
the bomber were flying through a hail storm. From the tail the
crew could hear George Buske announce over the interphone: "I'm
hit." A 20-mm shell from a diving enemy fighter had exploded
and filled the tail with deadly shrapnel that moved forward.
Forrest Vosler remembered:

"There was a lot of
shrapnel coming through the aircraft. I don't know where it came from,
but to the best of my belief it was pieces of our aircraft...I was hit
in both legs.

"I stood there for a few
moments, terribly scared...I could also feel the blood flowing down my
legs.

"Several things went
through my mind. One of them was that there was no question about my
getting the Purple Heart. My next thought was that 'This is a very
serious business I'm in, and I've got to do something to protect
myself or I'm not going to make it.' Survival is paramount to anybody
in combat, so I immediately sat down in my chair (at the radio desk)
to try to avoid being hit again. I figured I'd got an armor-plated
chair and it curled up around my back.

"As I sat there
contemplating my next move, I thought how silly my actions were,
because I didn't know where the next bullets were going to come from.
I had to have the chair facing the right direction, or this wasn't
going to work. It wasn't going to stop any bullets. So I figured:

"If this is the way
it's going to be, at least I'm going to die standing up. I'll do the
job. I might as well just get up because I'm not going to protect
myself with this chair. This is stupid!"

Opening
the radio hatch, Sergeant Vosler found his most difficult task in
choosing which enemy fighter to engage first. It seemed, indeed,
that the entire Luftwaffehad painted a bull's eye on Jersey
Bounce, Jr.

Ed Ruppel tracked the lone fighter
that made a pass from below but the attacker rolled and dove
before he could trigger his guns. The situation above was much
worse, where they dove in groups of eight or nine from the ten o'clock
position. Forrest Vosler added his fire to the steady stream that
flowed from the top turret, where Bill Simpkins had his hands full.

During a very brief lull Simpkins was
sent to the tail to provide first aid for Sergeant Buske, and Ralph
Burkart moved from his waist gun to man the turret. As Simpkins made his way
to the back of the Fortress an ME-100 came up parallel to the
stricken bomber at the nine o'clock position, 800 yards out.
Burkart unleashed his twin-fifties in the top turret and sent the
enemy tumbling to the ground, black smoke trailing all the way.
Five minutes later he scored on an Me-109. When a parachute was seen
emerging from the falling fighter the determined gunner was credited
with a confirmed kill. (Burkart's first victory was listed only as
'probable" as no one witnessed a crash. A kill was confirmed
only if a crash was witnessed, or if the enemy pilot parachuted from his
stricken fighter.)

Meanwhile, in the shattered bomber's
tail, Simpkins found Buske slumped over his guns, unconscious and
bleeding badly. The veteran tail gunner had been hit in the
stomach and his flight suit was torn open to reveal a sucking wound in
his right chest which exposed the lung and continued downward through
his diaphragm to the gaping wound in his abdomen. Simpkins dragged
his comrade forward near the waist guns which were still firing at
incoming fighters. Burkart, who had left the bottom turret after
the solo enemy assault from below, left his waist gun long enough to
hand Simpkins a syrette of morphine. It was frozen from the high
altitude and crisp winter air that measured -45 degrees, and Simpkins
quickly thawed it by placing it in his mouth; then administered a double
shot to Buske. The compress bandages he applied with Burkart's help did
little to stem the flow of blood from multiple wounds, but at least they
hid the jagged openings in Buske's chest and abdomen.

Meanwhile, the running fight went on
as Lieutenant Henderson tried to extricate his battered bomber from the
nightmarish skies over Bremen. Firing from the right waist gun
position Burkart nailed an Me-210, shearing off the right wing. "You
got him," Ed Ruppel shouted. Bill Simpkins, having done all he
could for the dying tail gunner, manned the left waist gun to flame an
FW-190 that attacked from above at ten o'clock. Though Jersey
Bounce was in deep trouble, the ten-man TEAM that manned her were
refusing to surrender to the inevitable. In minutes they had
scored three probables, one confirmed, and undoubtedly addition kills
that had happened so quickly in the heat of battle that no one had
witnessed them.

At the moment the most vulnerable
part of Jersey Bounce was the empty tail where Sergeant Buske has
fought valiantly until struck down. After flaming the FW, Sergeant
Simpkins crawled back to the shattered tail. The guns were
unserviceable--could offer no defense, but Simpkins remained in that position to warn the
pilot over the interphone of any attack from the rear so evasive action could be taken in
the cockpit.

Indeed, a twin-engine fighter swooped
down on the silent tail of the Fortress, defended now only by
Forrest Vosler's single fifty protruding from the radio compartment
hatch.
The radio man pressed the trigger, striking TWO aircraft at once....

"My first burst knocked
pieces on the left side of his wing off. I was actually after
the engine or the pilot. I moved the gun rapidly over to try to get
him. I was firing as I turned, and I went right across the stabilizer
(of Jersey Bounce) and put a hole in it, because this gun had no
stops. Our plane seemed to be flying all right, so I didn't bother
Henderson with a little thing like hitting the stabilizer."

As the stricken enemy fighter dove
earthward ahead of a trailing plume of smoke, Vosler pulled his goggles
over his eyes and scanned the heavens for more targets. Almost
immediately the goggles fogged up, forcing him to push them back up on
his forehead. It was a fateful action, for at that very moment an
incoming 20-mm shell slid the opposite direction down the side of his
flex-held fifty to strike the breach and explode. Vosler fell
backwards, blood streaming from scores of openings in his shredded
flight suit.

"They're not playing the
game right, hitting a guy in the eyes," Vosler recalled as
being his first thought in that horrible moment. "I couldn't
see well, but when I moved my hand down to my chest where I'd been
hit--I was trying to open my jacket to find out how badly--I noticed
that my hand was shaking. I couldn't control it. Then I reached up and
dragged my hand across my face to see if there was blood, and when I
looked at it my whole hand was covered with blood.

"The shell fragments had
damaged the retina of my right eye, and I was seeing blood streaming
down the retina inside my eye, thinking it was on the outside.
So my natural feeling was that I had lost the whole side of my
face...I thought I only had half a face.

"I became extremely
concerned, I was out of control, really. Obviously I wasn't going to
have a chance to get out of this thing now. I knew I was going to die.
I knew my life was coming to an end. The fear was so intense, it's indescribable,
the terror you feel when you realize you're going to die and there's
nothing you can do about it. So I started to lose control, and I knew
then that I was either going to go completely berserk and be lost, or
something else would happen.

"And a strange thing DID
happen. I lived every day of my life. I relived my whole life, day by
day, for 20 years. It put everything in perspective. For the first
time I realized what a wonderful, wonderful life I had had. There were
only a few days in my whole life that were bad, and I asked God to
forgive me for those bad days, and thanked Him for all the many wonderful
days he had given me. I said, 'I'm not going to ask you for any more
days. It's been too nice.' I even reached out my hand and said,
'Take me, God, I'm ready.'

I became very content, very calm,
very collected. I no longer feared death, which is a terrible thing to
fear. And I slowly realized that if God didn't want to take me at that
particular point, then I had to go on and do the best things I could
do."

Forrest Vosler was indeed hit bad.
Besides major wounds in his chest and hand, smaller shrapnel wounds were
evident everywhere else. Ed Ruppel recalled: "He was shrapnel from his
forehead to his knees, everywhere. There was blood all over him, coming
from all those little shrapnel cuts. There was no place where you could put your
hand and stop the blood. I knew he was hit bad in the eyes, too, because
I could see the white stuff running down below one eye and onto his
cheek."

It was the wounds to the eyes that
bothered Forrest Vosler the most, not only for the sheer horror of being
in the battle of his life and unable to see clearly, but because he
still believed he had lost half his face and was permanently
disfigured. Having confronted the prospect of death and making
peace with it, and then realizing that perhaps he was going to live
after all, he set himself to the task of preparing his radio.
Training took over as he undoubtedly recalled the admonition from Radio
School: A day
will come in combat when the job of getting home is up to
the radio operator.

In the cockpit the bomber's instrument
panel had been knocked out after two direct hits. "We couldn't
tell whether we were flying sideways, upside down, backwards, or
what," Remembered Ed Ruppel. "So we hit the deck,
and started to come home that way." Lieutenant Henderson
was flying so low that his bomber was now subjected to small-arms fire
from the ground, but it was largely ineffective. It was obvious
that the battered bomber, struggling along on only two engines and
shredded from nose to tail, would never make it back to England.
Priority now became staying airborne long enough to cross the hostile
coastline and reach the North Sea. The pilot ordered all
unnecessary equipment jettisoned to lighten the load and increase that
prospect.

Struggling against his pain and unable
to see his radio clearly, Vosler got on the interphone to advise the
cockpit that he would transmit an SOS as soon as Jersey Bounce
reached the water, beyond enemy territory. Lieutenant Henderson
replied: "I think you better send it now!"

Thinking with unusual clarity, despite
all he had been through, Forrest responded, "Sir, let me know
when we're going down, and I'll send the SOS. When you can't keep the
aircraft airborne, let me know. In the meantime, if you keep it up,
let's not break radio silence."

Meanwhile the rest of the crew
continued to throw out anything not critical to their survival. The
worthless tail guns went out the back, the waist guns followed.
Cans of unexpended ammunition, tools, anything that added extra weight
to the pilot's impossible task of remaining airborne long enough to
reach the sea went out the hatches.

As Bill Simpkins scoured Jersey
Bounce for unnecessary weight he passed the radio room where Forrest
stood ready to do his job. "He had his back turned to me, and
was standing up working at the radio," he recalled of the
moment that was one of the flight's most poignant. "I looked him right in the
face, and I saw there was stuff dribbling down his right cheek from his
eye. He was in a daze, groggy, visibly shook up. He wasn't normal.

"As we were throwing things
out, he said, 'Your throwing everything else overboard. Well, why don't
you throw me overboard? I'm just so much extra pounds. Throw me out,
too.' And he really meant it, because he asked me more than once to
throw him out. I didn't say anything, really, I just sloughed it
off. I didn't take him real seriously, even though I knew he was
getting serious about it."

At no moment during the desperate race
to the sea did anyone other than Sergeant Vosler consider the wounded
radio man "extra pounds," though they did remove and jettison
his shoes--"Which I resented. I figured if we landed on land,
how was I going to walk? I'm barefoot."

Near
the coast line the low-flying bomber picked up more flak, but all of it
exploded at a safe distance. Minutes later Lieutenant Henderson looked
down to see nothing but white-capped waves beneath him. Jersey
Bounce had somehow reached the North Sea.

A single, unexpected enemy fighter
stood between the now-unarmed bomber and the last race for
shelter. Fortunately the Me-109 chose to attack the nose, where
Lieutenant Monkres had not yet jettisoned his flex gun at the
bombardier's station. It was the only weapon remaining on the
bomber but it was in the right place at the right
moment. Monkres fired a burst that sent the fighter scattering,
then disassembled his gun and dropped it into the turbulent waters
below.

Minutes earlier, when the crew had
been hurriedly tossing all extra weight from their struggling bomber,
Forrest Vosler had carefully guarded the radio. Though unable to
see clearly and wracked with pain, he clearly instructed the others in
finding and inserting the right frequency modules he would need in order
to contact Search and Rescue once over the ocean. This done, the
remaining modules were thrown out the window. Now, flying low over
the North Sea, he prepared to send out the SOS.

At first there was no transmission,
but keeping his mind clear and remembering his training, Vosler quickly
located the problem--a loose connection on the transmitter key. He
couldn't see clearly enough himself to make the repairs but calmly gave
instructions to the men who now huddled around him in the radio
room. "I sent the SOS out at different speeds," he
recalled, "and I got an immediate response from England. They
receipted my message, and asked me to give a holding signal for 20 or 30
seconds while they shot a true bearing on me. I responded and gave them
the signal, and they came back, and gave a receipt on that one. They
said they had my course, and asked me to transmit every 10 or 15 minutes
so that later they could correct their bearing."

Vosler maintained his composure,
sending out two or three more signals at the appointed intervals until
almost half-an-hour had passed and Jersey Bounce was only sixty
miles from the coast of England. They were met in the air by four
British Search and Rescue planes prepared to either escort the
floundering B-17 to land or to pick up her crew in the sea. Land was
indeed now in sight and it was difficult for Lieutenant Henderson to
decide which of the two was the safer option. With his instruments
out he ultimately concluded the best was to ditch his bomber at sea.

The
Goldfish Club

Following World War I in the
dangerous early years of aviation, airmen who were forced to parachute
to safety from disabled aircraft became members of an exclusive
organization, the Caterpillar Club. The record-holder in
this exclusive, informal organization that continued through World War
II and exists to the present, was Charles Lindbergh with four emergency
jumps.

World War II bombing missions out
of England sent pilots and crews out from home fields on an island,
forcing them to cross water both going to and returning from
target. On November 23, 1942, Lady Fairweather piloted by
Lieutenant Arthur Reddig ditched in the Bay of Biscay. All ten
crewmen were lost, the first casualties in the 303d Bomb Group. On
December 20, 1942, while returning from a mission to Romily, France,
Lieutenant Orville Witt's bomber was shot up so badly it was unable to
complete its return home, ditching in the English Channel. Again,
every man was lost.

Ditching at sea was proving fatal, but not always. On January 3,
1942, Lieutenant Frank Sanders and three of his crew were pulled from
the Bay of Biscay by the enemy after their B-17 went down. They
were the first Hell's Angels to survive a water landing, and as
such became the 303d's charter members of the Goldfish Club.

Established in November, 1942, by
Mr. C. A. Robertson who was Chief Draughtsman for one of the world’s
largest manufacturers of Air-Sea Rescue equipment, the Goldfish Club
became the counterpart to the Caterpillar Club. Airmen who
bailed out of stricken airplanes over land were accorded membership in
the latter. Any person who survived a landing on water (sea, lake,
river, or canal) and was saved by their floatation equipment or life
raft, became members of the former. By the end of the war
membership numbered more than 9,000 Goldfish, including men from every branch of
service.

By December 20, 1943, eighteen Hell's
Angels bombers had been forced to ditch in water. Sixty-nine airmen
survived, many as POWs, to receive the water-tight membership card and
distinctive patch of a Goldfish. Lieutenant John Henderson
and his crew were about to become the newest members of the Goldfish
Club, if they survived.

Ditching was a dangerous procedure,
quickly evidenced by the fact that of 180 pilots and crew of the 303d
alone, only 69 had survived. Crews were trained in, and practiced the procedure.
Thus, as Lieutenant Henderson and Captain Hungerford struggled with the
controls in the cockpit of Jersey Bounce, all eight other crewmen
gathered in the radio room, facing forward. The body of the still
unconscious tail gunner was laid carefully on the floor, cushioned by life
preservers.

Lieutenant Henderson dropped to
wave-top level, watching the rise and fall of the swells to time the the
moment of impact. Landing in a trough could be fatal, swamping the
bomber before all hands could scramble to safety. In the radio
room Forrest Vosler remained at his station, punching out codes to
maintain communications with the nearby Search and Rescue
aircraft. He paused only long enough to share reassuring
words with his worried comrades, sharing the peace he had learned in the calm that followed his earlier face-to-face with
death. "Don't worry," he repeated, " you're going to be alright.
Relax!"

On instructions passed through Forrest Vosler, still
at work in the radio room, Henderson set a course that would put him
down just ahead of a nearby Norwegian trawler. With airspeed down to 90 miles per
hour he then caught the crest of a wave and dropped his
tail wheel. Jersey Bounce rode
the white-cap like a surfer, then shuddered to a sudden stop that threw
everyone in the radio room violently forward. Salt water bubbled
up from the bottom turret, and without taking time to express relief,
the crew went into action--repeating the process they had practiced
before on dry land.

As
Jersey Bounce filled with water the crew exited through the
radio room hatch and moved in different directions, half of them to the
starboard (right) wing and half to port. Bill Simpkins was one of
the first to exit to the starboard in order to help lift Buske's body
through the hatch and lay him quickly but gently on the wing. He then
returned to break out the life raft while Vosler stood on the
fuselage. "Somebody was going to help me out, but I said I
thought I could boost myself out all right," Woody remembered. "I got on top of the fuselage, looked down,
and Buske was slipping (off the wing) into the water.

"I yelled to the pilot, but
I could see he wasn't going to respond fast enough. They had pulled the
life raft out and it was floating on top of the wing, and Henderson was
busy trying to cut the cord on the life raft so it wouldn't go down with
the airplane. I knew Buske would be in the water in a fraction of a
second.

"I jumped and held out my
hand at the same time. I grabbed the antenna wire that runs from the top
of the tail to just forward of the starboard radio compartment window. I
prayed that it would hold, and I was able to grab Buske around his waist
just as he was going into the water, sliding off the trailing edge of
the wing."

It was a valiant, unbelievable
accomplishment for the young radio man whose own body had reached, and
already surpassed the limits of human endurance. Vosler strained
against the antenna wire holding his wounded comrade until the others
raced to secure both men. Quickly they all loaded in the life
rafts and pushed away from the sinking bomber so they would not be
sucked below by a vacuum when the sea claimed Jersey Bounce. When
but a short distance away they looked back sadly as the nose dipped,
lifting the tail momentarily high in the air, and Jersey Bounce dove
for the final time.

The
nearby trawler moved in towards Bill Rupple's raft, but he waved it
towards the other containing Vosler and Buske. Once the wounded
were safely aboard, the Norwegian ship returned to rescue the remaining
men.

A doctor aboard the trawler treated
Buske, shaking his head in concern. Prospects for the young tail
gunner's survival were not good. A short time later the men were
transferred to a British Search and Rescue PT boat for the long ride
home. The whole crew spent the night in the hospital at Great
Yarmouth, England, where Bill Simpkins was treated for wounds to his
hand and back. The following morning eight members of Lieutenant
Henderson's crew flew back to Molesworth. Forrest Vosler and
George Buske remained behind to fight a different kind of war--a war for
life.

Captain Hungerford's war ended one
month later on January 14 when he was shot down on a mission over
LeMeillard, France. He survived but spent the rest of the war as a
POW.

Lieutenant John Henderson's crew
received replacements for their wounded comrades and flew nine more
combat missions. On a February 24 mission to Schweinfurt, Germany,
his No. 2 engine was destroyed by flak and the crew was forced to bail
out. Henderson, Lieutenants Woodrow Monkres and Warren Wiggins,
and Sergeants Stanley Moody and William Simpkins were all captured and
interned as Prisoners of War.

After multiple blood transfusions
and treatment for shock and hypothermia, George Buske underwent the
first of many surgeries to close the wounds that exposed his lung,
intestines, and several ribs. Beset by infection and able to take
nourishment only intravenously, his weight dropped to 88 pounds. In May
he underwent further operations to seal still open wounds, and skin
grafts for his right thigh. By mid-June was was strong enough to
be returned home for more treatment at the Army's Halloran General
Hospital on Staten Island. In November 1944 he was at last able to make
a three-week furlough home, after which he requested and was granted
permission to return to active duty at Langly field, Virginia. He
was not discharged from the Air Force until September 3, 1945, two days
after World War II was officially over.

Returning to Rochester, New York,
George Buske worked as yard foreman at a lumber company until retiring
in 1978. During the period he also married and raised a family.
After suffering heart problems in 1988 he again went under the knife for
a successful coronary artery bypass surgery. While recovering from
that operation his surgeon visited him to present an unexpected
memento--an encrusted shell fragment found near his heart that had been
there for forty-five years.

The indomitable George Buske died
in Rochester in 2003.

Like George Buske,
Forrest Vosler endured several surgeries at Great Yarmouth before
he was stabilized enough to return home. Meanwhile, the story of his
heroism in the skies over Bremen were well-publicized in the
American media making his a celebrity of sorts. In many ways,
all of America followed his healing process and prayed for his
recovery.

Forrest flew home on
February 26 for treatment at Deshon Army Hospital in Butler,
PA. He was also, at that time, promoted to Technical
Sergeant. Meanwhile his nomination
for the Medal of Honor was approved, though the President himself
delayed presentation pending additional surgery. In the months
since the mission over Bremen, Forrest Vosler had become totally
blind in both eyes.

While the media
monitored Forrest's progress a 25-year old University of California
student offered to have one of her own eyes removed and transplanted
to restore the young airman's sight. Vosler was moved beyond
measure, claiming such sacrifice greater than all he had done that fateful
day six months earlier.

Before leaving
Deshon for more treatment at Valley Forge General Hospital,
surgeons removed Vosler's dead right eye and a cataract over his
left. For the first time Forrest saw light, though it was
blurry and intermittent. He entered Valley Forge General on
June 2.

On August 25
Forrest Vosler opened his one good eye and for the first time saw
color--the multi-colored Red Cross afghan that covered his
feet. "God was sure good to me," he remarked.

Six days later
Technical Sergeant Forrest Vosler was at the White House, receiving
the Medal of Honor from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He later explained the delay in presentation of the award after its
approval, and why it happened so quickly when at last his sight
returned:

"The
presentation was held up by President Roosevelt because of my
blindness. I was totally blind, and he would not let general (Hap) Arnold present the medal. He said HE wanted to do it. He
absolutely refused to have General Arnold do it and said he wanted
to do it himself.

"He
called my doctors in the hospital (shortly after the award was
approved) and asked the doctor if there was any chance that I
would regain my vision. The doctor assured him that there
was. He said, 'When he does, let me know.'"

As
only the second enlisted airman in history to receive the Medal of
Honor important work remained for Forrest Vosler. He told
newspaper reporters, "I guess I won't see any more fighting
and I wish the war was ended, but I've got to help them out with
their war bonds drives and so on. I don't like being touted around
as a hero, but if it helps the war, I guess that's the only thing
left that I can do."

When he was honorably
discharged from the Air Force on October 12, 1944, Woody was quoted as
saying: "I feel like a heel. I'm getting out but other guys
are staying in."

Forrest Vosler
spent a 30-year career as a counselor with the Veterans
Administration, continuing his service to his comrades. When
the Army Air Force became a separate branch of service, he was
instrumental (along with Jimmy Doolittle) for formation of the Air
Force Associaion.

Forrest Vosler passed away in Titusville, Florida, on February 17, 1992, and was
buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His widow, Virginia,
donated all of his medals including his Medal of Honor to the U.S.
Air Force Enlisted Heritage Institute where they remain on display
to inspire a new generation of American airmen--and potential
heroes.

James H. Howard "I seen my
duty and I done it!"

I
would be greatly remiss to fail to recognize the great work of the 303rd
Bomb Group in their official website. It is an incredibly
well-done history with extensive detail on the men and aircraft who
helped to preserve our freedom.